So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany, had written _Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot_. Leigh Hunt, in England, amused himself, in _Imagination and Fancy_, by cutting little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours, and in _Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot_, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had been trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates that had never been bitten. “Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache.... Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents, besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa, Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.”